'Munich' Is Artistic Indecency

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'Munich' is artistic indecency

By Eli Reshef, M.D.

Imagine the unimaginable -- Jewish religious zealots murder in cold blood members of the Palestinian Olympic team during the 2008 Olympic Games. Anybody, even an accomplished writer or director, who tries to soften the horror of such an event by "objectively" presenting both viewpoints may suffer a worse fate than Salman Rushdie.

Enter "Munich," Steven Spielberg's greatest missed opportunity. Here was an event, the killing of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics, that had the drama, the villains, the heroes, the horror -- all clearly outlined in plain view; the perfect ingredients for another one of Spielberg's genius epics.

What I saw in the movie "Munich," as an Israeli who joined the Israeli army in that same year, was a miserable attempt to glorify the drama, while diluting its message with self-serving simplistic intellectual fluff. I'm not sure a movie depicting Muhammad Atta's misgivings and apprehension about crashing into the World Trade Center would win any hearts anywhere but in certain madrasas in Pakistan. Similarly, any attempt to attribute humane or intellectual properties to the Munich killers does a tremendous disservice to those of us with even a hint of clarity of vision.

As an Israeli and a Jew, I became angry at the movie's inability to portray the enormity of the crime to the uninitiated and less informed. Instead, Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner (a proverbial anti-Israeli self-hating Jew) used the silver screen as a platform for a pseudo-intellectual existential ideology that rotted long ago in French bistros.

Those of us who witnessed this act via the media will eventually be a minority. What remains for future generations is the visual and printed media to define and commemorate cataclysmic events. What is the message to generations to come via "Munich" -- that there is goodness in anything that is evil, and that revenge is inherently evil? True, violence often begets violence. Does that dictum imply that we should use the pen against a vicious terrorist using an AK-47 or an airliner as a weapon?

I tolerated, though barely, the fake Israeli accents, the bogus misgivings of the Israeli assassins, even the sexual climax scene while a cold-blooded murder was taking place -- all presumably for the sake of stimulating an intellectual debate. Poetic liberties are, after all, the essence of art. What I could not take was how diluted the portrayal of pure evil has become, how the death of innocents has been so trivialized by this faulty intellectual exercise.

Reshef practices medicine in Oklahoma City.